Never Was Any Real Money

Simon Johnson, along with Roubini, Steiglitz and Krugman, seem to be the fair haired boys of the critical left.
Somewhere I read that that the financial sector portion of our economy has mushroomed so much in recent years that it can't possibly be healthy or even accurate (but Europe is worse, apparently.
Anyway, Andrew Sullivan features Johnson today, so I do, too.

We don’t know how much of banking profits in recent years were illusory and should not have been booked as GDP. In fact, it would not be a big surprise if - eventually - we go back and mark down our true production of goods and services in 2007 by 2 or even 5 percent. In this sense, we face a statistical situation similar to that of the Soviet Union at its demise - once they figured out that all their military production had no real value, they had to reduce measured GDP sharply. It is not compelling to say we should necessarily go back to where we were in banking.

One commenter had this, which I will treasure:
...we are more often threatened by refusal to see the consequences of conventional actions than by defiant desires for destruction. “

This is the important message of “The Reader”, the movie in which Kate Winslet won this year’s Oscar for best actress.

P.S. If you follow the link, be sure to scroll down to statsbguys comment. Enlightening.